With Eyes Cast Downward

by A Lil' Irish Lass

October 8, 2009

You’ve all seen it in the streets before. After a hard rain, when there’s nothing but ugly puddles everywhere you look. Inconvenient puddles at every intersection. You try to avoid them, but five inches of your pants ends up soaked anyway. And then the five year old walking next to you decides that now would be a great time to jump in and splash about. Filthy dirty speckles of rainwater over every inch of you. And you’re always wearing white too.

But just as you are about to snap and, I don’t know, beat that five year old to within an inch of his life with your umbrella, you get to another intersection and look down. You’re not sure if it’s just a trick of the eye so you look a bit closer. Lean left a little to get a different angle. You smile. It’s there alright. A rainbow in the middle of that filthy dirty puddle.

Sure, it’s just oil. Runoff that the downpour chased off the streets and into the ruts and potholes. Technically. But it’s also a rainbow. A fleeting swirl of beauty in the middle of all this drear and gloom. A bit of technicolor added to the black and white and grey.

You smile.

It’s been raining for a long time now. I’ve been hopscotching my way over job puddles, and economic puddles, and coursework puddles for months. I’m ankle-deep in a filthy pool of water and my umbrella, the only modicum of protection I had, has been turned inside out by the wild winds of the past several weeks. I stop at intersections and see nothing but this grey surrounding me. Feel nothing but droplets pelting my face and soaking my soaked clothes further.

And then, just when it all seems too bleak to bear, I catch a rainbow out of the corner of my eye. Right there in the puddle I was just about to leap over.

It sometimes seems as though we haven’t seen the sunlight, felt its warm rays upon us, for a terribly long time. We look back across the weeks leading to today and all we seem to remember is the rain, cold and grey. The forecast is damning and we can see more storm clouds gathering on the horizon, hear the thunder roll in the distance. We look up to the sky and search for the tiniest patch of blue, the smallest glint of light. We look in desperation. In vain.

But maybe, all along, it’s been a problem of perspective. A question of which way we’re looking. We’ve spent so much time straining our eyes, trying to see something way off in the distance that isn’t even there, that we’ve missed the beauty that’s right at our feet. The rainbows in the puddles that we’re busy stepping over.

So, the next time it rains, look down. It’ll keep the rain out of your eyes and, you never know, you might just see something beautiful. And it might just make you smile.

A Lil’ Irish Lass writes here.